I are consulting for the best means how to accommodate it without going directly against my conscience.' 'We are consulting to find such a present compliance as may stand with conscience and policy.' In October Murray was sent back to London on a secret mission, which he undertook at some risk of ' putting his neck to a new hazard,' but on his return he informed the king 'that the Scots commissioners hindered him to do anything therein for the little hope he could give them of his ratifying the covenant.' Soon after he and Sir Robert Murray [q. v.] made arrangements for the king's flight, but when the critical moment came Charles changed his mind. After the king was given up to the English, Murray was forbidden his presence, and returned to the continent. In 1648 the queen sent him to Scotland to further 'the engagement,' and to persuade his countrymen to receive the Prince of Wales, whom she wished to take part in the effort for the deliverance of the king. He first tried to induce Argyll and the dominant party in the church to support the resolutions of the Scottish estates, but, failing in this, he took counsel with the Duke of Hamilton and his friends, and in May he returned to the continent with letters from them formally inviting the prince to Scotland.
Among those who gathered round Charles II at the Hague immediately after his father's death Lord Byron mentions 'old William Murray, employed here by Argyll.' After the Scots commissioners returned unsatisfied in June 1649 from their visit to Holland, Charles sent over William Murray with private letters to Argyll and Loudoun. It is to this period apparently that John Livingston refers in his 'Autobiography' when he says that William Murray and Sir Robert Moray, who had long been very intimate with Argyll, 'put him in hopes that the king might marry his daughter.' In 1650, when the Scots commissioners were treating with Charles at Breda, Murray was sent with instructions to them, and in May of that year Sir William Fleming, who carried letters from Charles to Montrose, with whom he was still in correspondence, was directed to advise with William Murray and others as to whether Montrose should still keep the field or not. This goes to show that Murray abetted and shared in the king's duplicity. Burnet says that Murray was 'very insinuating, but very false, and of so revengeful a temper that rather than any of the counsels given by his enemies should succeed he would have revealed them and betrayed both the king and them. It was generally believed that he had betrayed the most important of all his [the king's] secrets to his enemies. He had one particular quality, that when he was drunk, which was very often, he was upon a most exact reserve, though he was pretty open at all other times.' The last statement does not seem very credible, but the attempt to please both his royal master and the extreme covenanters was not compatible with straightforwardness. He received his earldom from Charles I at Oxford in 1643, or, as Burnet says, at Newcastle in 1646, when he persuaded the king to antedate it by three years. As the patent did not pass the great seal, he ranked as a commoner till 1651, when, according to Lament's 'Diary,' several of the gentry were ennobled by Charles II, and among them 'William Murray of the bedchamber, who was made Lord Dysart.' He died early in the same year.
He married Catharine Bruce, grand-daughter of Sir Robert Bruce of Clackmannan and Margaret Murray of the Tullibardine family, and had two daughters. The first, Elizabeth Murray, countess of Dysart and afterwards duchess of Lauderdale, is separately noticed. Murray's second daughter, Margaret, married William, second lord Maynard.
[Douglas's Peerage ; Complete Peerage, by G. E. C. ; Clarendon's History ; Gardiner's History of the Civil War; Balfour's Annals ; Baillie's Letters ; Burnet's History of his own Time, and Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton '; Letters of Charles I in 1646 (Camden Society, 1855); Disraeli's Charles I; Masson's Life of Milton; Napier's Life of Montrose.]
MURRAY, Lord William, second Lord Nairne (d. 1724). [See under Nairne, John, third Lord, 1691-1770.]
MURRAY, WILLIAM, Marquis of Tullibardine (d. 1746), was the second and eldest surviving son of John, second marquis and first duke of Atholl [q. v.], by Lady Catherine Hamilton. At an early period he seems to have entered the navy for in a letter dated at Spithead, 29 Aug. 1708, he gives his father an account of an unsuccessful attempt at landing on the coast of France in which his ship took part (Hist. MSS. Comm. 12th Rep. pt, viii. p. 64). At first he was known as Lord William Murray, but became Marquis of Tullibardine on the death of his elder brother John at Malplaquet 31 Aug. 1709.
Tullibardine was one of the first to join the standard of Mar and the Chevalier in 1715, and although his father remained faithful to the government the bulk of the Atholl men
